photo credit: Lauren Manning
The trouble with Seven Databases in Seven Weeks is that it’s a bit of a playground. Ostensibly, it’s about becoming a well-rounded developer. That probably works, if you push through this in seven weeks. I’ve been picking it up more for fun than for progress. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
The book is well organized. You’ve got seven databases to work on. You get to work on relational, key-value and graph databases. You get to work with systems that do a few things really well and some that are general purposed. You can crank the scale up with some of these, working in large clusters if you’d like. You work from a very basic introduction to beginning to explore and branch out. The topics interweave so that you don’t really feel lost.
There are some pretty hip databases in the list: PostgreSQL, Riak, HBase, MongoDB, CouchDB, Neo4J and Redis. PostgreSQL is becoming the new black (in my circles, anyway). Redis is my favorite go-to for NoSQL issues. But what about the others? Ha! Exactly! You’ll get into these technologies deep enough to not only see these technologies, but to see them in action.
And, that’s the big gap, isn’t it? Getting from the manual to a practical understanding of a technology. So, we write our hello world applications, and we Google around to find tutorials. But then we’ve got to leap out and start experimenting on our own. We’re groping for the big picture. That’s what this book is about.
You’ll learn about technologies surrounding these databases. HBase comes with a discussion of Thrift in a distributed cluster. Neo4J comes with a discussion of Gremlin. For PostgreSQL, you’ll learn about full-text searching and hypercubes. Redis comes with a practical discussion of configuration tradeoffs.
You don’t have to know what any of these are about. You are introduced to interesting things to do and interesting ways to solve them. Mostly, you’re encouraged to roll up your sleeves and get comfortable using these tools. And, if you’re like me, you’re going to find yourself straying from the track. I think that’s a good thing. Competence comes from practice.
Bottom Line: if you’re interested in data, pick up this book. If you want to get a job with these technologies, plan on going much further than the book. All in all, this book doesn’t sit on my bookshelf, it sits on my desk, for every time I want to try something interesting.
